The health care burden of acute chest pain

Abstract

The ESCAPE (effectiveness and safety of chest pain assessment to prevent emergency admissions) randomised controlled trial of chest pain observation unit versus routine care³ required prospective identification of all patients attending with acute chest pain; it thus provided an ideal opportunity for a descriptive study of the health care burden created by this problem. We aimed to describe the clinical epidemiology of acute chest pain, the incidence of emergency department presentation and hospital admission, the proportion with ECG evidence of acute coronary syndrome (ACS), clinically diagnosed ACS, non-ACS, or undifferentiated chest pain, and variations in these parameters by hour of day and day of week.